The Grim Smile of the Five Towns — Reading Notes

The Model Youth and the Little Jockey

The opening of 'The Lion's Share' introduces Horace Carpole, a nineteen-year-old whose virtues are enumerated with deadpan precision: he saves money, pays his tailor's bill promptly, folds his trousers in the same crease every night, and is 'a good listener.' He is, in short, 'too perfect for a district like the Five Towns.' His stepbrother Sidney, by contrast, is a 'little jockey'—fair-haired, blue-eyed, beloved by everyone, and chronically ill. The narrator notes that Sidney's smile and scowl are 'equally effective in tyrannizing over both his mother and Horace.' This asymmetry—the virtuous outsider versus the charming invalid—sets up a dynamic that will drive the story toward its grimly ironic conclusion. Bennett's voice here is clinical yet wry, cataloguing virtues as if they were symptoms.

The Portrait and the Burglary

In 'The Burglary,' Sir Jehoshaphat Dain, a knight, conspires to have his own portrait stolen. The painting, presented to him 'as a mark of public esteem and gratitude,' has become an 'intolerable incubus.' His sons mock it; London newspapers ridicule it. Sir Jee arranges for a burglar named William Smith to remove it, even unfastening a window catch 'as per contract.' The scheme is elaborate: he sends the servants away, stays alone in the castle, and listens at two o'clock for the muffled noises. When he sees the canvas being passed through the window, he feels 'equal to pretending that he had no knowledge of the burglary.' Bennett renders this with a dry, almost legal precision—'as per contract,' 'the previously-arranged scheme'—that underscores the absurdity of treating a crime as a business transaction.

The Grim Smile as Narrative Lens

Throughout the collection, Bennett's narrator adopts a stance of ironic detachment that never quite hardens into cynicism. In 'The Lion's Share,' he steps back to remark that the story 'strikes me as being, after all, a pretty grim tragedy.' This self-conscious shift—from telling a joke to weighing its human cost—is the collection's signature move. The Five Towns themselves are a character: a district 'devoted to jokes,' where a sin or two might have endeared Horace to the neighbourhood. Bennett's prose mirrors this environment: flat, unadorned sentences that suddenly open onto emotional complexity. The 'grim smile' is not just a title but a method—a way of looking at provincial life that acknowledges both its comedy and its pain.

Readers coming to these stories should attend to the spaces between Bennett's matter-of-fact sentences. His characters often reveal themselves through what they fail to say—Horace's loneliness, Sir Jee's humiliation, the weight of a portrait that cannot be destroyed by arson because someone would save it. The collection rewards a slow reading that savours the precise, unshowy language and the quiet accumulation of detail. Bennett does not explain his ironies; he lets them sit, grim and smiling, on the page.

Reading Bennett’s quiet humiliations in the Five Towns, I found myself remembering Haliburton’s Sam Slick, that sharp-eyed Yankee. Both see the small deceits we carry for pride’s sake. One laughs, the other sighs, but they share a fond, weary grin at human folly. It felt like meeting an old acquaintance in a stranger’s face. The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England — Complete — Background and Themes holds that same mirror up.